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In 2021, physicists at the University of Bremen cooled a cloud of rubidium atoms to 38 picokelvin — 38 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero — the coldest temperature ever recorded in a laboratory. At the opposite extreme, the ALICE experiment at CERN produced quark-gluon plasma at 5.5 trillion kelvin in 2012, the hottest temperature ever achieved by human hands. Above both records, the Planck temperature — 1.416 × 10^32 kelvin — marks the point where physics itself breaks down. Between these endpoints, the temperature scale encompasses every phenomenon in the universe, from interstellar clouds barely above nothing to the supernovae that forge heavy elements.

On July 4, 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson at 125 GeV. Here is how the LHC, ATLAS, and CMS found the particle that gives other particles mass.

In 2011, the OPERA experiment reported neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than light. Six months later the culprit was a fiber-optic cable not properly plugged in. Here is what really happened.

How Tim Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal at CERN became the Web, released to the public domain in 1993, and grew into the infrastructure of modern life.

John Bell's 1964 theorem showed quantum entanglement is real, not a gap in our knowledge. His life at CERN, Belfast roots, and death before his Nobel make his story uniquely poignant.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, released it free to the world in 1993, and has spent 30 years fighting to keep it open and equitable.

The Higgs boson explained: how particles get mass, the 2012 CERN discovery, Standard Model, and why the 'God particle' nickname is misleading.

Machine learning didn't just assist the Higgs boson discovery—it's now reshaping how physicists search for physics beyond the Standard Model.

How CERN detected the Higgs boson, confirming the mechanism giving particles mass

The LHC is a 26,659-meter ring of superconducting magnets that smashes protons together to test the Standard Model. Here is how it works, what it found, and what it is still hunting.

For every particle of matter, physics predicts a mirror twin made of antimatter. We make it, store it, and use it in medicine — but we still don't know why the universe has so little of it.